Forget
by NightbirdSongbird
Summary: Thrown into a coma, Legolas wonders abstractly why he ever bothered to do it in the first place. Not so much memory loss as emotion loss.


I didn't want to have to leave. Believe me, I didn't. All I wanted was to stay together forever. With my knight, my lover, my life- Haldir.  
  
I suppose it is my fault that I can't get myself back. That I can't find my soul. But it can't be too long now before Haldir finds out where it is being held and saves me all over again.  
  
It's so cold, so icy and grey. Everything is dark, dark as though the sun has been blotted out. My eyelids are shut, no matter how hard I will them to open. It is always dark and cold for me. It has been so since eight years ago, when it happened.  
  
Haldir's arms wrap around me. I can hear his voice as clear as a bell, chiming and musical. His arms are warm.  
  
"I'm sorry," he begins, as he does every night. And I think hard what I want to happen. What I want to say. But nothing happens. I can only think. :Don't be:  
  
"I couldn't find it. No matter how many monsters I defeat, none of them are holding your soul."  
  
:I love you, Haldir:  
  
"I know you can't hear me-"  
  
:I have heard you every time you have spoken to me:  
  
"-and I know that you probably will never wake up-"  
  
:But I want to!:  
  
"- but remember this, melda. I love you still. I will always love you."  
  
:Ai, it hurts to hear such grief, melda. I love you, I love you! I want to see you again... eight years is too long...:  
  
Haldir embraces me and gives me a soft kiss on my frozen lips. There was a time when I could have risen to meet his kiss, but that was before it happened. Before I lost something too precious to be bought and too vital to be replaced, before I was thrown into this shadow world.  
  
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I whisper entreatingly, and the words echo in the hollow passages of my mind.  
  
"Melda..."  
  
:What now?:  
  
"I must leave you to find you. I have to go. This means I won't be next to you when you wake up, because I might have travelled far before I find your... your soul... I will come back, melda. I promise. I swear it on my heart."  
  
:Love... I trust you.:  
  
Footsteps walk away from the stone dais upon which they arranged my body, until the world I exist within is as silent as it is dark.  
  
I am all alone.  
  
It isn't fair. All that I wanted was to be his forever. Only that. I love him. I worship him. I would obey his every whim if I could. I just wanted for him to see that I loved him so deeply, but when it came up I thought it was my chance and took it.  
  
I lost my heart; as long as the evil one lives I am an empty shell.  
  
Sauron.  
  
The trouble with having your soul absent is that it sends your body into paralysis. And the trouble with paralysis is that I can't even cry. Or maybe I can? I don't remember anymore. I don't remember why I loved him or why I needed him or how it felt to love him or any of those things that took up my entire being before it happened. Maybe I am not really trying. Maybe I don't want to wake up.  
  
Maybe I'm the only thing stopping myself from moving. But I still don't want to move, so I won't bother finding out. I can't move, says the dull and weary voice in my memory, because it would kill him to know that I can't feel. That I don't remember how we used to be. I can't wake up. His heart would be broken.  
  
Or am I just afraid that he'll find out I forgot everything that we lived for?  
  
I don't want him to know I don't remember. But I've forgotten why.  
  
I hate the dark. It chokes me like hands about my throat, smothering and ensnaring as a shroud. In my dream I am in a room made of dust, dust everywhere. Dust is on the floor, dust is on the ceiling, dust in the carpet, dust on the walls. Dust everywhere.  
  
In my dream, I try so hard to breathe and I can feel that there is dust on the inside of my body and covering the outside, and that I am like a statue because I can't move, just keep standing here and waiting and getting dustier and dustier until finally the dust is so heavy that I can't move.  
  
And eventually the dust becomes me and I become the dust, and I melt like ashes into the dust, bones crumbling, skin disintegrating, eyes rotting, all into the dust, that is covering everything and anything.  
  
Finally, all that is left is my heart beating with a sad, slow, coughing rattle until the veins are coated with dust, pumping small clouds of dust into the air; until finally my heart stops beating and collapses, crumbling like burning paper and disappearing with a sigh into the enormity and the weight of the dust.  
  
In my dream I am burning slowly into ashes, from the bottom up, like I am made of wood. It takes ever so long a time for the flame to flicker, as though time were increasing and weighing it down like iron.  
  
I do not smoke, I only smoulder, the grey ashes like powder floating away until I am a skeleton, and finally the marrow within the skeleton burns and the skeleton collapses, and all I am is ashes blowing away on the wind.  
  
The odd thing is that I never feel pain.  
  
I have... forgotten. 


End file.
